


Zero, A Play By Numbers

by jazzfic



Category: Big Bang Theory
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-02-22
Updated: 2011-02-22
Packaged: 2017-10-15 21:08:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,159
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/164949
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jazzfic/pseuds/jazzfic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Penny's life as an actress takes a sideways turn when Sheldon Cooper, director of all things aspiring but mostly unachievable, introduces his little company of players to the world of originality. (Theatre AU)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Zero, A Play By Numbers

_Anne Frank_ had been a failure on all measurable counts, there was simply no denying it. Coming home after a non-existent after party (while the bowling alley didn't close early, it didn't exactly have a fantastic bar scene--not unless you happened to be into blue slurpees and hotdogs), Penny didn't even bother undressing. She simply stood at the end of her bed, and performed a bellyflop worthy of a Tony. Pity the role of Anne hadn't called for such overwrought theatrics. It might have livened up the play a little, apart from the tiny detail that it had been pretty much dead to start with.

How Sheldon had thought it would make a "wise and worthy entry into the local theatrical annals", she had no idea. But then, nearly everything about Sheldon Cooper was a mystery to her.

Which was why, somewhere in the middle of her bellyflop of despair, with the echoes of bowling balls as artillery fire still in her head, Penny made a decision.

A friend from high school had sent a vague email about doing a month long roadtrip with a couple of other girls they knew. If she had been tempted before, after tonight it was a done deal. It wasn't as if the Cheesecake Factory was putting her on a fast track career trajectory to bigger and better things, and really, one performance above a bowling alley does not an actress make. There was a meeting planned soon for their little theatre group. So when Sheldon handed out the next pile of scripts, Penny would smile and say thanks, but no thanks.

At least, that was the plan.

Until the afternoon of their meeting rolled around, and she walked into The Tulip coffee shop, slid into the seat next to Raj, and found herself staring at _Zero, a Play by Numbers, by Sheldon Lee Cooper_.

"You're kidding me," Penny said.

One look into his eyes, she knew the answer was no.

"Penny, you know very well, that I do not, under any circumstance, 'kid'."

Well, she could say goodbye and adieu to that roadtrip. Penny glanced across at Leonard, who saw her look of disbelief and could do nothing but shrug. That was that, then. Leonard Hofstadter, genius producer, all-around master co-ordinator, miracle worker and sufferer of Pasadena's answer to Orson Welles, was pretty much the group's barometer when it came to judging Sheldon. Today he simply wore an all-too familiar expression of tired acceptance, glasses slightly askew and hair on a gravity defying kick, and Penny knew the decision had already been made.

"Of course you don't," she replied, aware that Sheldon was still waiting for an answer, and would likely wait until the stars twinkled their last. She ducked her face behind a menu. "How silly of me."

This seemed to satisfy him. "Very good," he said, missing her tone as always. He raised his voice to encompass the group at large. "Fellow Pasadena Players--I have called this meeting to put forth out next endeavour. You have already had a chance to peruse and ponder the title. As you can see, we are leaving behind the world of recycled material, tired prose and musical miscellany so overused and trodden in the local theatrical circles, to step into the brave, beautiful plane of originality. I present to you, _Zero_." He sat back, eyes bright with triumphant satisfaction. "A play by numbers. In two acts."

"Only two?" muttered Howard.

Penny hid her smile as Sheldon ignored him and proceeded to open the cover of his own script. She could always rely on Howard to cut to the nub of the issue, just as she could also rely on their pie-in-the-sky director to once again fail to understand sarcasm if it hit him in the face, monologue style. But her smile dropped when she saw the tiny, tiny typeset (how freaking long was this thing?) and the opening lines:

 

>   
>    
> 
> 
> Act 1
> 
> Scene 1
> 
> A room. White, stark. A single table and two chairs stand in the centre. A man (Claude) sits, writing. A woman (Marie) enters stage left. She is carrying a sheet of paper, and a pencil.
> 
> Marie  
> No, no, no. Oh, this doesn't add up. This fraction makes no sense.
> 
> Claude  
>  _Still writing_  
>  Then I suggest you start again. Perhaps this time incorporating a counter before your integers spin into infinity.  
> 
> 
>   
>    
> 

 

"Um. Sheldon?" said Leonard.

"Yes?"

"Okay, how shall I put this...is this play--" He flipped through the pages, expression looking even more pained, "--just two people, _working out a math problem?_ "

Putting down his script, Sheldon huffed quietly with controlled exasperation. "Leonard, please. If that's the narrow-minded view you're going to adopt, I'd rather you didn't partake in this meeting."

"I'm going to be _producing_ this thing, Sheldon. I kind of have to."

"Then if you would please hold back your opinion until we have a consensus view on the matter."

"You mean yours..."

Sheldon's eyes narrowed briefly. "I will choose to ignore that. Now." He turned his attention to the others. "What do we all think? Apart from Leonard, that is."

Penny chewed her bottom lip. She was saved answering right away by the arrival of the coffees, but that only gave her seven or eight seconds of thinking time as she stirred too much sugar into her latte. She glanced across at Raj and Howard, who were both thumbing through the pages, looking crestfallen.

"I assume," Penny began, "that I'm Marie?"

Sheldon nodded, smiling a little. "You assume correctly."

"And Claude...?"

Raj raised his hand. "Um, I think there might be a problem if I'm playing a dude named Claude. Going to look a bit odd, don't you think?"

But Sheldon shook his head. "No, Raj, let me stop you. There will be no issue on names, because you will not be playing the lead."

"I won't?"

"No."

Howard frowned. "Then who will?"

And right before he said it, the second before, she knew. She knew, goddamn it.

"That would be me," said Sheldon.

 

~

 

When Penny got home, she sat on the couch, thinking.

Well, she mainly thought one thing. One little word.

Disaster.

Sheldon Cooper did not act. Sheldon Cooper directed. Sheldon Cooper dictated from upon high, giving his voice to a group of struggling actors who just wanted to put on safe, happy theatricals for the locals, tread the boards a bit, thrill the crowds that never appeared. Putting on an original play, without a single laugh (she knew this by merely skimming the worryingly dense dialogue), and with Sheldon as the lead? It just wasn't going to work, full stop.

She rubbed a hand over her face tiredly. As far as she could see, the only way it might work was if they all got smashed pre-premiere, and instead of the play did a few hours of improv, in a white room with only a pencil and stack of college ruled paper as props. Maybe that would be fun. She'd yet to see their venerable director drink more than a vodka and cranberry, minus the vodka. Who knew, get a bit of alcohol into him, he might very well turn into Brando.

Now, that would be something to see.

There was also a small, niggling issue that Penny was trying not to think too much about. How was she going to possibly act opposite him? They barely went two minutes without arguing about _something_ \--how on earth would they survive two whole acts in a minimal set, waxing metaphorically about math (which she knew was a Sheldon-metaphor for some great truth or other...she just hadn't yet figured out what), without tearing each other to bits?

It was impossible, there was no other way to put it. Absolutely impossible.

Penny picked up the script again, opening a page at random, near the end.

She stared at it. She stared at it for a very long time.

"Oh, holy _crap_."

 

>   
>    
> 
> 
> Marie  
> Claude. I think I've worked it out.
> 
> Claude  
> Tell me.
> 
> Marie walks over to the table. She takes the pencil from Claude's hand, and kisses him.
> 
> Claude  
> (long beat)  
> Oh.  
> 
> 
>   
>    
> 

 

Penny stood up and went to the fridge. She walked in slow, considered steps, unscrewed the first bottle she could find, held it poised over a glass, thought for a moment, and then took a long slug neat from the icy neck.

 _Oh_ , indeed.

 

~

 

Because they were usually so strapped for cash, rehearsals were held in Sheldon and Leonard's apartment. It was a loft, on the other side of the city, and so large that Leonard often joked you could fit in the cast of _Les Mis_ and still have room for a small, discerning audience. One upside to having a trust fund and highly successful, if very much absent parents, was that Leonard could afford to teach Science at the local middle school in the day, and pursue a love for theatre every other waking hour, even if he did have to share rent with Sheldon. The apartment gave them somewhere to kick about and try new things, all the while searching in vain for venues to actually perform in (inevitably always a step backwards, like the bowling alley for _Anne_ ; she shuddered to think where they were going to put on _this_ ).

Meanwhile, in an endeavour to knuckle down and make something out of this approaching disaster, Penny had dug out her old math books from high school, but all this did was bring back unhappy memories of Dwayne Nicholson with his eye patch and breath that brought in mind a deadly nerve gas. One look at the sticky pages and she had immediately closed the covers. She was just going to have to channel her inner Meryl Streep and play the part of a repressed mathematician, searching for life's meaning in numbers, all the while harbouring a secret passion for her fellow brainiac, _Claude_ , aka _Sheldon_ , aka a world of impending doom in which Penny stood front and centre.

"Okay, thespians and nerds," she announced grandly, standing at the door to the boys' apartment, as usual, making her best entrance, and as usual being completely and totally ignored. "Let's get this circus underway."

Sheldon, head buried in a script, chose that moment to stop by the doorway and block her view of the room. Penny leant around him to get a better look at what Howard had managed to construct. He really was a whiz at making something out of nothing, and today was no exception. Furniture had been pushed aside to make way for a box like space, three white screens in place of walls, and a white table and chairs.

"Nice job, Howard," she said, catching his eye as he edged past her, wrench in hand and a roll of duct tape hanging off his wrist like a bracelet.

"That's right, honeybunch. I can do Kubrick like the best of them," he replied with a wink. "Even if it is on a two dollar budget. I suppose that's one good thing about minimal and pretentious: it's gloriously cheap."

"Pretentious?" Sheldon repeated. She now saw that he actually had a pencil tucked behind his ear. If he was going for the absent-minded genius look, it was a pretty good start. Although, that wasn't exactly a stretch for a guy who counted his fridge magnets and paper clips on a weekly basis to ensure the apartment inventory was not disturbed. She'd heard some horror stories from Leonard about an actual roommate contract, but she refused to believe even Sheldon was _that_ odd. He gazed at Howard and Penny. "I take umbrage at the very insinuation!" And with that he wandered away, flipping pages.

Leonard, who had overheard, made a face. "Isn't irony just so..." He squinted through his glasses, pretending to think. " _Ironic_."

Penny shook her head. "It really is."

"So. How does it read to you?" he asked her, grinning as he noticed her rolled-up script. "Gotten to the good bit yet?"

She whacked him gently on the arm. "Shut up. I'm trying not to think about that."

"Who knew our Sheldon was a romantic."

"Get real. He's in love with numbers, end of story."

"I think it's rather sweet."

Penny rolled her eyes. "You got over _your_ doubts pretty damn fast. What's all that about?"

He laughed. "I just figured that _Zero_ was a pretty apt title. It's going to make zero money, and debut to a similarly numbered audience. We might as well let him get it out of his system, so we can return to _H.M.S Pinafore_ just as we were meant to all along."

She glanced across at Sheldon. He was gesturing to the air, looking not at all unlike a giraffe in ugly corduroy pants and even uglier chequered shirt, which he had buttoned up all the way to the throat. Who even dressed like that? He really was a man of his own, strange world. Maybe Leonard was right, why hold back the inevitable. It could hardly get any worse.

 

~

 

She was wrong. On every count imaginable.

"No, Penny. Listen to my pronunciation. It's non- _euclidean_...euc- _lid_ -ean. Again from the top, please, page nineteen."

Penny groaned and threw her script down on the little table, watching listlessly as it slid off the edge to the floor. The stupid little prop table, that was so small that when she and 'Claude' both sat down, their knees bumped. The first time this happened, it had been mildly amusing. This was the twenty-seventh, and she was on the verge of kicking him. If she had the energy to even raise a foot, that is.

"For God's sake, Sheldon! This was supposed to be a read through, not deportment school for mathematicians."

But he simply gave her a look. That look, which only Sheldon could produce. The one that said, you are arguing in the face of a brick wall, an immovable object so steadfast and maddening that you will merely run yourself to the ground. And the most irritating thing of all was that he only ever seemed to produce it for her. She should probably feel flattered.

"Fine," she sighed, as Raj helpfully retrieved her script and found the right page. Poor guy--he had been left with the tiniest walk-on role as Man Delivering Telegram From Nobel Prize Committee, or something equally uninspired, but he had stuck around as moral support.

Meanwhile, sitting motionless with statuesque calm, Sheldon waited.

"Ready?" he asked.

She nodded.

"But Claude," Penny began, looking him in the eye, her voice softer. "We are taught these things through non-euclidean models. Are we really going to abandon all that?"

His face remained the same, but something shifted in Sheldon's gaze, and she knew she had it.

Leaning across the table, his eyes moved to the pencil in her hand. There were his knees again. "We have to," he said. "There's no other way."

Silence. Out of the corner of her eye, she thought she saw Leonard smile.

Well, okay.

She had been wrong about some things. But maybe not all.

 

~

 

Penny had an early shift the next day, but when she woke, instead of her usual bleary routine of shower, coffee, stand before the wardrobe and wonder if adding a teddy bear barrette to her hair will make her look cute and whimsical, or just twelve, she lay there for a moment, in her tangled sheets, trying to remember her dream.

It had been a strange one. She'd been rehearsing some weird, minimal play about numbers, in a knock-off Stanley Kubrick set, in which she and Sheldon played very serious, very earnest 1950s mathematicians, all horn rimmed glasses, neat shirts and ties. They'd been discussing a world ruled by numerical formulas, searching for an end point from where everything could be traced back, and everything could begin again. They'd sat at a little table, written studiously in pencils on studious college ruled paper. Sheldon had finished a monologue on the meaning of zero, and Penny--

Penny had kissed him.

In this dream, with a silent audience consisting of Leonard, Howard and Raj, she had leant down, stopped Sheldon Cooper from writing, taken his face between her hands and kissed him on the lips.

Ignoring the buzz of her alarm, she stared up at the ceiling and pondered a lot of things, some strange, some not so strange. Some not...entirely unpleasant. And nearly all of them about the one individual she did not want to be pondering about.

Eventually the noise began to hurt her ears, and she rolled out of bed with a groan.

Funny what denial can do, she thought, gazing at her reflection in the mirror as she considered and unconsidered the barrette. Take a dream and turn it into reality. It wasn't as if she had a lot else to go on.

 

~

 

Leonard, by some stroke of genius, had managed to secure a venue for their first (and possibly only) performance. It was an actual theatre this time, with velvet seats, creaking boards, a maze of narrow corridors...and dressing rooms. Proper dressing rooms.

"Seriously?" Penny stared at the light bulb bordered mirror, while Leonard hovered behind her, appearing inexplicably pleased with himself.

"Seriously," he said happily. "You can go the full Liz Taylor in here."

"Leonard, you have no idea," she replied, matching his grin. She was already picturing the list of requirements she was going to hand, diva-like, to Raj. Or maybe not. But a girl deserved some fun, right?

At least, until the actual work began. And she had to deal with Sheldon.

She caught Leonard looking at her in the mirror.

"What?" she asked.

But he only shrugged.

 

~

 

"Guys, guys, there's some _serious_ numbers out there."

"Howard, are you okay? You look a little...white."

"You mean whiter than usual."

Typical Howard. In the face of mounting terror, he could still make a self-deprecating joke. And on opening nights, these tended to come thick and fast.

Leonard looked shifty. "Look, ticket sales weren't going so great. In fact they could have been measured on an infinite negative scale. So I, maybe, invited my Seventh Graders."

Penny raised an eyebrow. "Invited?"

"Okay, ordered. I told them it was a requirement, part of their arts and sciences curriculum, except sort of...combined."

Howard groaned. "Great. A two hour treatise on math, wherein two boring souls find out the real meaning of zero in a world of chaos, over a shared love of pencil lead. They're going to really dig that."

"Hey." Leonard held up his hands. "I'm a producer. I produce crappy amateur theatricals, not audiences filled with critics from _The New Yorker_. We make do with the best that we have, and this, my friend, is _all_ we have." He scribbled something on the clipboard he was carrying, adjusted the bluetooth headset that was hooked around his right ear, and glanced at his watch. "Fifteen minutes, guys."

Penny watched him leave. She peered down at her costume, dowdy tweed skirt, dowdy shirt, plain, sensible heels. Her hair was in a bun, and she patted it nervously to make sure it wasn't unravelling.

Out of the corner of her eye she saw Howard glancing at her with a smirk, and aimed a finger at him. "First line that comes out of your mouth about librarian fantasies, and we're gonna have words, mister."

"I didn't say anything!"

"No, but your thoughts virtually leer through your _eyeballs_ , Howard."

She walked away, back to the dressing rooms, heels clacking on the floorboards. The murmur of the audience rose and fell as she threaded her way through the maze-like corridors. She really, honestly, had no idea what they were going to make of this thing, and the fact that they now appeared to have an audience with a mean age of thirteen and a half didn't exactly bode well. But Leonard was right; they had to make the best of what they had. If this was it, then so be it.

Penny was so wrapped up in her thoughts that she lost track of where she was going, and turning a corner, walked smack bang into her co-star.

"Ow! Sheldon!"

"Don't you mean, ow, _Claude?_ " he corrected. She glared at him, watching as he repositioned the eyeglasses more firmly on his nose.

And then she started laughing.

"What?"

"I'm sorry. You and glasses, they just don't mix."

"Well, I might say the same about _you_."

"I'm not wearing glasses."

There was a pause. Sheldon looked down at her skirt. Actually, he didn't so much look as his eyes sort of drifted. Something flipped a little in her stomach. "No," he said. "But you don't normally wear...that."

"You think I look strange?" she asked, quietly.

He didn't answer. They simply stood there, looking at each other, until there came a crackle from the speakers above, and then Leonard's voice, all tinny and sounding like he was talking to them from another world. Which, Penny thought, maybe he was.

"Five minutes."

 

~

 

So. This was the situation as Penny saw it.

The night could go any endless number of ways, each with its own positives, each with its own absolute, uncontrollable negatives. But there was one constant that each circled round, the end point where all paths inevitably finished.

Sheldon. Or, more to the point, looking Sheldon in the eye, and playing a part that she maybe, sometimes wondered was a fallback from reality.

She suspected he would rather like that metaphor. Oh, he'd disagree, for sure, tell her in that superior way of his that she had not grasped the full meaning, that she had trimmed it to fit a trivial situation when it belonged in the realms of philosophy, some higher place she couldn't possibly understand; but Penny didn't care, because she knew there would be a part, just a tiny part of him, that understood her completely.

Now, see, if her old textbooks had said something along the lines of _that_ , she might have paid more attention.

 

~

 

"This isn't working."

She watched him; he was restless, mind moving at lightspeed and body barely managing to catch up. Turned away from her, he held himself at a position so that she couldn't quite see his face, but the frustration was tight in his voice, clear in the absolute quiet.

"I know." She sighed. "I know...listen, maybe if you tried looking at it from another angle, another starting point--"

A noise escaped from the back of his throat. He was clearly on the edge of losing it altogether. She scraped her chair back, carefully, took a step towards him. "Claude?"

"Angle?" he repeated. It was an odd tone, incredulous in part, but almost as if he were asking the question rather than challenging her. He brushed past and sat back down, his knees bumping the table leg so that it screeched and made her jump. She could hear the sound of a pencil being taken up again, _scrape, scrape_ , on the paper. She folded her arms and looked down. The light of the room, artificially bright, reflected off the tops of her leather pumps.

She thought for a moment, and then said, "Claude..."

No answer.

"Claude," she repeated, more forcefully this time. She turned back, watched his hands move across the table, the bend of his neck. And finally, softly: "I think I've worked it out."

He exhaled dismissively, too absorbed to grasp her meaning. "Tell me."

Marie walked over to the table.

Marie, with her sensible hair, neat and plain in her dowdy skirt, stopped by his shoulders, removed the pencil from his fingers, and took his face between her hands; she kissed him, let him feel the smile on her lips, just for a second, and then she broke away.

"Oh," said Claude.

 

~

 

This, too, was the situation as Penny saw it.

A scene, going in any number of ways. Two people, and an audience, or two people, alone.

Forget logic, forget meandering paths leading to endless possibilities. There was only one that she could see, and he was sitting right there.

Penny walked over to the table.

Penny, with her hair falling a little from the bun, feeling the too-warm air on her face, the anticipation of a hundred pairs of eyes; she remembered how he'd looked at her in the corridor before, thought of the question he hadn't asked. She thought of this, and a lot of other things; very gently, she brought his mouth to hers; she kissed him, let him feel the answer on her lips, just for a second, and then she broke away.

"Oh," said Sheldon.

Well. This was one boring, pretentious play these thirteen year olds wouldn't forget in a hurry. Embrace every cliché, Penny thought, while inside she danced a little wildly, to the beat of her heart. You could have heard a pin drop.

 

~

 

"Raj! You and your seven words were every bit as magnificent as...no one said they would be!"

At Penny's grin, Raj, forever the consummate performer, stepped into the dressing room, posed theatrically, and said, "Always, my dear lady. Always."

She hugged him. When they broke apart, Penny's grin turned into a wry shrug. "Yeah," she said. "It was pretty crap, wasn't it?"

He nodded cheerfully. "Yep."

She pulled at the bobby pins in her hair, pulled them until it tumbled loose on her shoulders. Raj's eyes gleamed.

"Well, apart from...you know what," he added.

Opening his hands, she gave him both the pins, and a look of pure, sweet innocence.

"By my life, Rajesh Koothrappali. What _could_ you mean?"

 

~

 

Okay, so as far as community enterprises went, it was pretty much an all round flop. Not a cent was made, and as much as she liked to think that Leonard's Seventh Graders had been treated to a glimpse of a new generation ready to take on the mantle of the next Steppenwolf Theatre, one glance at the audience on the single curtain call had downed that romantic notion with a bang.

They looked on from the safety of backstage as the last of the kids filed out. Sheldon made an unhappy noise and turned to Leonard.

"Did you actually _tell_ those teenagers that they weren't allowed to have their mobile phones switched on, or did you merely _suggest_ it, allowing them the unfeasible pleasure of making that decision for themselves." His eyes narrowed and he shook his head. "I think not."

With that he strode away, exasperation trailing almost visibly in his wake. Leonard's mouth opened and closed, until finally he gave up, reaching to untangle the headset from around his ear. It caught in his glasses.

"Well, my mom just _loved_ it," Howard said brightly. "She can't stop raving about it. She's calling it 'a beautiful disaster', and plans to tell all her friends at bookgroup to rush to the next performance."

"Which there will never be," sighed Raj.

This more or less put an end to the conversation--not that there had exactly been a scintillating one to begin with--so they watched Leonard instead. Now his glasses were falling off, and the cable running up to his mike had somehow become tangled in his clipboard. "You need a hand there, buddy?" Howard asked, after a moment.

" _No_."

"Well, okay then."

More silence. Raj rocked on his feet, smiling happily. "You know, this will make a wonderful anecdote," he said. "The sort of thing that Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson would have talked about, back when they were still together and having intellectual dinner parties. The play that flopped followed by Leonard and his bluetooth that wouldn't unhook. I love the theatre."

 

~

 

She found him on the steps outside. He was still in most of his costume, but his shirt was coming untucked from his belt, and he'd yanked the tie loose.

Penny sat down. "Lost the glasses, huh?"

He looked at her blankly for a moment, then pointed to his pocket, where they were neatly folded away. She smiled a little. Not so messy, then. Still Sheldon.

"You know, it wasn't all that bad," she said. " _I_ had fun."

"I'm glad."

His voice was flat and kind of quiet, but he did sound sincere. That was something. She tried again.

"You write a mean non-euclidean function, Sheldon."

This finally seemed to cause a reaction. The corner of his mouth lifted slightly and he turned towards her. She could see the streetlights reflected in his eyes, yellow mixed in with the blue, although it was getting too dark to properly make out color. Perhaps she saw what she wanted to see; the figuring out of a problem, Claude's voice; Sheldon's: _everything comes from zero, Penny, everything, it's where we start_.

He had nice eyes, she thought, out of nowhere. He knew his numbers, knew a lot about everything, really. Funny how she was only noticing these things now, and not beneath the bright artificial lights, but in the quiet outside, in the real world. Sometimes she was scared of his intelligence, often it unnerved them all; but sometimes, like here, like tonight, she just wanted to breathe it in. She wondered if he knew that.

And she wondered if maybe she didn't mind.

"Thank you," he said. "And you did a passable job performing it, Penny."

She nudged his shoulder with her own.

"Just passable?"

"Only just."

"Well, good then. I wouldn't want to think I was over achieving, first night and all."

A car drove past, skimming through a puddle. It was beginning to drizzle. Penny shivered, and rubbed her hands together. This would be an ideal scene to light up a cigarette, watch the embers burn and the rain glisten through a warm cloud of smoke. The prefect noir ending. That could be Sheldon's next project. She rather fancied herself with red lipstick and dark, hooded eyes, a life full of indifference and the smell of booze. Where the kiss would really be a kiss, ballsy and breathless. She could almost taste it.

She smiled, and after a beat turned back to face him. But his thoughts were on the same page, ahead even, and he was already looking at her.

"I liked that," Sheldon said, quickly. "When you--"

"Yeah," Penny said.

The thud of footsteps behind them made her stop what she was going to do, which was...well. She wasn't really sure. Maybe at his words she'd leant towards him, just a bit; maybe he'd done the same at her reply. But with the sound his mouth tugged a little to one side and his eyelids dipped and she found that she couldn't read his expression any more. Penny turned her head and smiled as the others wandered down, and there they stood and sat together, a huddle of tired faces in the rain. For now, at least, the play was done.


End file.
